LinuxWorld Expo Boston (2006) – Day 2

Synopsis on Day 2 of the Expo. Ars talks to the Linux Terminal Server Project …

On Day 1 of LinuxWorld Boston 2006, Ars Technica toured around the .Org Pavillion to get a feel of the expo. On Day 2, we decided to track down a few people in the Novell booth and the .Org Pavillion. In particular we wanted to find out more about iFolder, the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP), and a not-quite-even-alpha project called "Gimmie". Unfortunately, Brady Anderson of Novell was not around to give us an update on iFolder, but we did manage to get interviews with Jim McQuillan of LTSP and Luis Villa of GNOME. Rounding out the end of the day, we attended the first annual SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards.

Jim McQuillan, the lead developer of the LTSP, gave Ars a short demonstration of the power of the latest release of LTSP 4.2 which was announced only a few days ago. In their booth, they had a couple of thin clients, 1Ghz machines with only 128MB of RAM with only a PXE-enabled Ethernet card (and no hard disk.) Upon powering up the computer (thin client), the PXE network card locates the Linux Terminal Server, grabs the kernel and boots to a login screen in under 25-seconds. Since the machine itself does very little work, it only needs enough RAM to run the kernel and X windows. All the serious work is done by the terminal server and the information about what to display is streamed over the network. Jim reports that the minimum system requirements for a thin client is a computer with a PCI bus and 32MB of RAM, 64MB preferably.

The thin client has support for USB and other local device support. So even though the terminal server does most of the "heavy lifting", it is still possible to dynamically use local devices, like USB flash drives and CD-ROMs, directly via the thin client. 100Mbps Ethernet is more than enough for even dozens of thin clients. If scaling to hundreds of thin clients, Jim recommended the use of 1Gbps from the server to the switch and 100Mbps to each thin client was fine.

What about audio and video? Well, currently the video is decoded from its native format on the terminal server and then streamed over the network to the thin client. While, windowed video looks okay, full screen video is naturally a problem as it gobbles up bandwidth pretty quickly. LTSP is currently working on allowing the system to keep the audio or video in its native format and then having the thin client do the decoding so as to save bandwidth and get full screen video to work properly. Along the same vein, they are already working on VoIP SIPP clients which will allow the user to plug in a USB headset and connect to an Asterisk server, and voila: instant VoIP!

Other new features for LTSP 4.2 include reduced amount of memory required, Scanner Access Now Easy (SANE) which allows scanners to be plugged into thin clients and accessed from anywhere on the network, and Multi-head X window support.

The next stop on our tour of the .Org Pavillion: the GNOME booth to talk with Luis Villa about a brand new project called

According to Luis, Gimmie is an experiment on what a "panel" can look like. More specifically, Gimmie is what you could call a glorified start button/task bar, except it does not really manage tasks and it is not so much about applications, but more about how human nature deals with information.

Screenshot of People as top-level objects

For example, most files on a computer are associated with an application. If you want to work with that file, you must open an application to manipulate that file. The top-level objects are files and applications. But what if "people" were considered top-level objects as well? After all, we frequently associate conversations and other information with people. Gimmie still allows the use of frequently used files and applications (like the "Start Button"), but it also tries to "silo" information about people. With Gimmie, people are considered top-level objects and the files, email, IM, VoIP, images, etc. involving these people are all associated with each person respectively.

Now before you all go running out to try this fancy new software, Luis wanted to make it clear that there has not been an official release yet and the code can be considered not-even-pre-alpha. With this in mind, if you still want to mess around with it, you will have to get it via their subversioning system. What this project really needs right now is some good hackers. See here for the current 0.1 project plan of Gimmie.

The SourceForge.net crew announce the awards for project superlatives

The Rest of Day 2

Ars spent the rest of the day hanging out in the Slashdot Lounge where we were treated to free T-shirts, ice cream, and kazoos. (Kazoos?) Yes, they were giving out cheapo, plastic kazoos so that we would all be inclined to make some noise during the first annual SourceForge.net Community Choice awards. Notable winners include: